The Message is the Medium, 2: Land Mines, Palestine, 1943

Continuing a stroll through the Illustrated London News for 1943 I came across a series of photos of Britain's "dependencies and friends" helping out in the war effort. This one is particularly remarkable and shows a vast

pile of yet-to-be-filled land mine canisters being serviced and readied for action in Palestine. Its hard to imagine this sort of a scene, and this is only a part of the canister dump. I reckon there to be easily 20,000 land mines just in what we can see, which represents about 1/1000th of all of the land mines used during the war. It also represents about 1/10,000th of all of the land mines that are in the ground right now around the world--in other words, this pile but 10,000,000 square feet worth. A pile like that could cover the square footage of the Empire State Building four times.

Emily Dickinson said that the brain was "the weight of god" ("wider than the sky" etc.)--if that's so, what are these things the weight of?